They were the most famous couple in the world. Newspapers called them “Liz and Dick.” Their romance was called the “marriage of the century.” And it began with a scandal so big that the Vatican itself spoke out against it.
Elizabeth Taylor married eight times, to seven different men. Only one of them did she marry twice. This is the true story of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
A first meeting that went nowhere
Taylor and Burton first met in 1953, at a Hollywood party in Bel Air. She was married to the actor Michael Wilding and was expecting their first child. Burton was a rising Welsh stage actor who had just made the film The Robe.
Neither was impressed. Taylor later remembered him as “rather full of himself.” Burton said she was “too bloody much,” and that she was totally ignoring him.
Nearly ten years would pass before they met again. And this time, the whole world would be watching.
The affair on the set of Cleopatra
In 1962, Taylor was filming Cleopatra in Rome, one of the most expensive films ever made at the time. Burton was cast as Mark Antony, her lover in the story.
Very quickly, the romance was no longer only on screen. There was one problem: both of them were married. Taylor was married to the singer Eddie Fisher, and Burton had been married to Sybil Williams since 1949.
A photographer caught the couple together on a yacht off the Italian island of Ischia, and the photo went around the world. The reaction was furious. The Vatican condemned them for what it called “erotic vagrancy.” Some members of the United States Congress even called for the two stars to be barred from returning to the country.
The scandal did not end the romance. It made them the most talked-about couple on earth.
The first wedding
Burton’s marriage to Sybil ended in divorce in 1963. On March 5, 1964, Taylor divorced Eddie Fisher in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico.
Just ten days later, she married Richard Burton at the Ritz-Carlton hotel in Montreal, Canada.
For the next ten years, “Liz and Dick” lived like royalty. They starred in eleven films together, including The V.I.P.s, The Sandpiper, The Taming of the Shrew and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966), the film that won Taylor her second Academy Award for Best Actress.
Burton also gave Taylor some of the most famous jewels in the world: the 33-carat Krupp Diamond, the 69-carat diamond that became known as the Taylor-Burton Diamond, and La Peregrina, a pearl with a history going back centuries.
But the marriage was famously stormy. Their fights, their drinking and their glamorous lifestyle filled the newspapers. As one sociologist later put it, they “became a cottage industry of speculation about their alleged life of excess.”
The divorce, and the twist nobody expected
In June 1974, after ten years of marriage, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton divorced.
It should have been the end of the story. It was not.
Within months, they were back together. And on October 10, 1975, they married for a second time, in Kasane, a small town beside Chobe National Park in Botswana. The short ceremony was performed by the local district commissioner, and two staff members of the safari lodge where they were staying signed as witnesses. The world only found out about it days later.
Taylor later said that what pushed her to remarry was a health scare: an X-ray had shown spots on her lungs, and she spent hours fearing she had cancer. The results turned out to be clear.
The second marriage did not last. In July 1976, less than a year after the ceremony in Botswana, they divorced for the last time.
Separate lives
Both moved on, at least on paper. Burton married twice more, to Suzy Miller in 1976 and to Sally Hay in 1983. Taylor married the politician John Warner, and later Larry Fortensky.
But they never fully let each other go. In 1983, they appeared together on Broadway in a revival of Noel Coward’s Private Lives, a comedy, fittingly, about a divorced couple who cannot stay away from each other.
The letter that came too late
On August 5, 1984, Richard Burton died in Celigny, Switzerland. He was 58 years old.
Shortly before his death, he had written a letter to Elizabeth Taylor. According to the authors of the book Furious Love, who said Taylor read it to them, Burton wrote that he wanted to come home. For Taylor, “home” could only mean one thing: back with her.
The letter reached her only after he was gone. Reports say she kept it by her bedside for the rest of her life. It was the only one of Burton’s letters she refused to share with the book’s authors.
Elizabeth Taylor died on March 23, 2011. Years after Burton’s death, she summed up what he had meant to her in one sentence:
“After Richard, the men in my life were just there to hold the coat, to open the door.”
Two weddings. Two divorces. Eleven films. And a love story that, in the end, came down to a single letter that arrived too late.
Sources: Wikipedia (Elizabeth Taylor; Richard Burton); CBS News and Vanity Fair reporting on Burton’s letters (2010); Sam Kashner and Nancy Schoenberger, Furious Love (2010); contemporary reports of the 1975 Botswana wedding.